Was Butler Right?

Shall I muse silently upon the deeds of recent past, or shall I recount them for you dear Reader?

My saddle time has been curtailed with a journey to the South Island to visit the place of my spawning and the bosom of my parents. It was also a chance for the co-habitating one point three metres of punching testosterone to spend some time with animals and pasture in a gentle environment.

As always it is an interesting experience to visit somewhere familiar and compare it to where I now live. Christchurch is flat, but butted up to the city are the Port Hills, and an hours drive away across the plains are the foothills of the ranges.

Bike riding is pretty easy, apart from when it's a howling Norwest wind, or the temperature takes one of those almighty plunges that it can down that way as a front comes through.

What is interesting is that there are a huge number of quiet country roads that are pancake flat, close to the city and as boring as Coronation Street, but also close by are the Port Hills and Lyttleton Harbour. While not riddled with roads, they do have a mix of terrain and climbs (and vistas) to make any rider swoon. The Summit Road is magnificent, only real drawback is that it's hellishly exposed to the wind on the tops and is very narrow, so the odd bad driver can be a pretty unpleasant surprise.

Great roads, and I wished I'd had my bike with me.

We did also venture inland to visit a relative who manages a large station, this place is a working station, with several thousand head of merino sheep and a few hundred head of deer.

My loin fruit was thrilled to run wild, talk to animals, ride things and be involved in a bit of sheep saving when the weather turned savage. For a city kid like him it was heaven.

The station is also well set up as a tourist operation with a lodge and gardens. It's spectacular country and is riddled with farm tracks, spectacular trout fishing and some MTB trails. It's just begging to be explored by bike.

And soon it should be. The local runholders have become very active in campaigning to establish a bike trail as part of the new National Cycleway.

From near Arthurs Pass down to Christchurch, off road, using a mix of existing farm tracks, rail corridor and a few new trails. The trail will run through a lot of the Waimakariri Gorge and pass through magnificent scenery.
The thinking will be to use some of the existing working huts and provide infrastructure to enable these to be provisioned for cycling visitors in a fashion similar to the Central Otago Railtrail. Brilliant thinking, allows the masses to see country that has remained unreachable up until now and provides another potential revenue stream for the local economy.

From a purely selfish point of view my real interest in the area lies with my relative. Some of it I went through as a child, going fishing or similar, but only on the margins. Now, through him there is a door that has been opened for me to go and ride some truly big country, true expedition riding. That, to me, is just pure, unalloyed gold.